The Day That Went Missing

A Family's Story

By: Richard Beard

Narrated by: James Langton

"Spellbinding, terrifying, deeply moving"—an unflinching portrait of a family's silent grief, and the tragic death of a brother not spoken about for forty years (Joanna Rakoff).

On a family summer holiday in Cornwall in 1978, Richard and his younger brother Nicholas are jumping in the waves. Suddenly, Nicholas is out of his depth. One moment he's there, the next he's gone.

Richard and his other brothers don't attend the funeral, and incredibly the family returns immediately to the same cottage—to complete the holiday, to carry on, in the best British tradition. They soon stop speaking of the catastrophe. Their epic act of collective denial writes Nicky out of the family memory.

Nearly 40 years later, Richard, an acclaimed novelist, is haunted by the missing piece of his childhood, the unexpressed and unacknowledged grief at his core. He doesn't even know the date of his brother's death or the name of the beach where the tragedy occurred. So he sets out on a painstaking investigation to rebuild Nicky's life, and ultimately to recreate the precise events on the day of the accident.

The Day That Went Missing is a transcendent story of guilt and forgiveness, of reckoning with unspeakable loss. But, above all, it is a brother's most tender act of remembrance, and a man's brave act of survival.

Winner of the PEN/Ackerley Prize 2018

©2018 Richard Beard (P)2018 Hachette Audio

Critic reviews

Shortlisted for the National Book Critics Circle Award

Shortlisted for the James Tait Black Prize and the Rathbones Folio Prize

"Beard, a novelist, takes a deeper look at the worst day of his family's life, when his younger brother drowned during their seaside vacation; the examination is both terribly moving and somehow life-affirming."—Boston Globe

"A memoir of real truth and heartbreaking emotional heft"—Sunday Times

"A touching, painful disquisition on memory and forgetting and the tendrils that tie us to the past."—Guardian

Fascinating exploration of grief and loss

Beard exposes a good deal of his emotional make up in describing his investigation into the long-ago death of his younger brother. His thorough and painful unraveling of the boy's drowning reveals the complicated and entwined story of personal and familial grief, loss, and marred memory. This book is written in many ways as a crime novel and so holds the readers interest as it lays bare the facts of the death alongside the dynamics of a family whose pain, denial and guilt had significantly erased the existence of the boy, Nicky, over time. Though poignant, the book is not maudlin--I found the exploration of the varied reactions to the accident one that could allow me to reflect on my own losses as well as on human emotion in general.

An Incredibly Powerful Personal Story

The Day That Went Missing is a haunting heartbreaking personal story of loss, memory, and the reality of pushing away pain and guilt until it virtually disappears. I found the book incredibly meaningful, but that's partially because it is too close to my own personal story. I lost my 13 year old brother in 1982, 4 years after Nicky died, in a car accident a half mile from home, in a car my father drove. Both Nicky and Kenny would be 50 years old within the next few months if they had lived. I highly recommend this reading of a deeply powerful book. Thanks.